Book review – Granny’s Kitchen Baking

Granny’s Kitchen Baking published by Penguin Books, is a lovely little book of baking treats.

We all remember the baking of our parents and grandparents generation. Good old honest cooking. This book is a nostalgic collection of Granny’s tried and tested recipes of your favourite biscuits, cakes and muffins and includes many many classics: banana cakes, carrot cakes, Florentines, Anzacs and lots of date, walnut, coffee and peanut butter based bakey goods. It also includes some not so everyday recipes like potato and caramel cake and a courgette cake that I would be really interested in trying out some time.

The book is divided into three core sections, biscuits, cakes and muffins. Following a brief introduction for each section, there is a page of useful tips on how to get the best results. The book includes over 150 recipes to choose from with quick preparation and baking methods. I love the fact that the ‘method’ for each recipe is very concise, often only having two to three steps to follow. My kind of cooking.

The layout of Granny’s Kitchen Baking is easy to read with one recipe to a page, generally. There are only a few photos, but with standard classics, like your granny might have made, photos are not so necessary. That said, I did opt to test the recipe from the front cover, which I have reproduced below. There is no contents page, but there is a comprehensive index.

I found the recipe for traditional scones easy to follow, concise and ultimately very successful. We talked about store cupboard meals in an earlier post, cupboard love. These scones are the ultimate store cupboard standby; economical and can be whipped up in the oven in under ten minutes. Definitely the kind of recipe I love.